Rational, balanced, evidence-based policy left the room long ago. In its place, it seems all you need now is a clever looking infographic posted to social media, and you’ll be getting “likes” from thousands of professionals and community members already persuaded to a particular agenda and “wanting to believe.” Very few bother to question sources, motives, or logic. As US President John F Kennedy so famously said: “We prefer the comfort of opinions without the discomfort of thought.”
One recent example is this infographic, posted recently to Linkedin. Predictably, it’s received a lot of likes and “thumbs up” – including from some academics who you might imagine are trained to be sceptical. The infographic is effective and simple. The message is clear: one train equals 625 cars. Trains are good, cars are bad.
The source of the graphic has been cropped by the poster,
but it was easily discovered thanks to Google. The origin was Seattle Subway
(logo cropped bottom right). At first I thought this might be a public transit
authority, but a further search revealed Seattle Subway is an “all-volunteer,
grassroots organization dedicated to promoting high quality transit for Seattle
and the Puget Sound Region on the fastest possible timeline.” So it’s a public
transport lobby group. Nothing wrong with that at all, but being a lobby group
means the infographic is suspect: it’s designed to promote their point of view,
and their point of view only.
Plus, you could also question the extent to which transport
circumstances in Seattle, Washington State, are comparable to Australian
cities. The population of Seattle is 755,000 and it has enjoyed reasonable
growth in public transport up until 2018/19. The public transport mode
share was an impressive 23% of trips. But that’s within the Seattle City
boundary. The greater Seattle metro area is home to 3.46 million people. The
public transport mode share for the wider region is just 10%. And like cities
the world over, public transport use has been adversely affected by Covid, and
mode shares may take time to recover.
That’s enough for the source of our mis-information graphic.
Now to the logic.
First, it assumes a four carriage train is 100% full, while
625 cars carry 1.6 persons on average. If cars were at capacity, they could
carry 4 or even 5 people each. Meaning more like 250 cars applying the same
occupancy logic. Not 625.
The buses must be big too. 15 buses for 1,000 people means
67 people per bus. Australian commuter buses carry around 44 seated. So the
buses in this mis-infographic are also absolutely chockers.
But maybe the biggest fail in logic is the presumption that
all 1000 people are leaving from the same place and going to the same destination.
Trains are fixed route transport modes, with fixed stations and fixed
schedules. They are the opposite of what we all do – varied routes, varied
schedules, and often multiple destinations in the same trip (school drop off,
work, gym, grocery store etc). The likelihood of all those cars and their
passengers heading for the same destination and taking the same route as the people
on the train, isn’t just remote but fanciful. That alone renders the mis-infographic
closer to propaganda than anything else.
But simple messages are effective, and this flawed logic
finds much support – especially amongst politicians who wilfully champion mega
spending on transport projects that promise much but deliver little. Witness the
latest Federal Budget which promises $1.6 billion toward the cost of a Beerwah
to Maroochydore rail extension. The State Government needs to match that with
another $1.6 billion. Perhaps tongue in cheek, the Courier
Mail reported it would be “full-steam ahead on major rail projects” under
the budget. Project enthusiast MP Ted O’Brien claimed
“It will get people out of cars and onto trains.”
A couple of years ago I presented on employment trends to
the Sunshine Coast Business Chamber, who were also enthusiastic supporters of
heavy commuter rail. Except that (according to the Census) of the nearly
300,000 total residents, 140,000 were in the labour force and of these, only
2,739 commuted to inner Brisbane where the rail would take them if it existed. 101,000
worked locally (within the Sunshine Coast), 5,000 in neighbouring Noosa, 4,000
in neighbouring Moreton Bay and a further 2,900 in the balance of the Brisbane
region.
So we could see another several billion of taxpayer funds
invested into another heavy commuter rail project to take unimpressive numbers
of commuters via fixed routes to fixed destinations on fixed schedules, when
all about us life is heading in the opposite direction.
It wouldn’t be quite so bad if there was hope that someone
was doing the practical research work on the future of autonomous, electric vehicles,
more efficient use of existing road networks, micro mobilities, permitting jobs
closer to where people live, the potential of drone delivery to reduce last
mile delivery traffic, or other initiatives, on a bi-partisan and
evidence-based approach.
Maybe what that needs is a clever infographic?
